And he’s taken a fancy to Annabelle from a while back. The son of a butcher who’s made a tremendous fortune in the railroad industry, Hunt is only tolerated in polite society because he has a few very powerful friends for business partners (including Marcus Westcliff - much, much more on him later). He’s rich, but most definitely not a peer. To save her family from ruin, to rescue her mother from infamy, and to keep her brother in school, she determines to snare a rich peer by the end of the season.Įnter Simon Hunt, who is most definitely what the Romans would have called a New Man. But impoverished as she is, Annabelle has to find a rich husband fast, or succumb to the worst - the clutches of a “benefactor” who’s already been enjoying her mother’s favours but would rather trade for the daughter. If it weren’t for her financial state, she would be an ideal wife for any aristocrat - beautiful, poised, graceful.
She is as a woman of her time would have been. While there’s a lot to be said for the heroines that are deliberately anti-establishment (and we certainly see plenty of that in various Kleypas novels), I like that Annabelle is a bit more, well, realistic.
She likes typically feminine things, and that’s okay.
I like Annabelle because she’s a bit unusual for a romance heroine - in that she’s actually conventional for her times in some ways that authors of the genre typically disdain. The four women strike up a bargain, to try and help each other find husbands, starting with the oldest - Annabelle.
Annabelle is utterly dowerless to the point where the men of the ton are just waiting for her to slide into fallen woman territory, the Bowmans are uncouth Americans and thus totally lacking in social graces even if they are millionaire heiresses, and Evie is not only the daughter of a man who runs a gaming den but also cripplingly shy and possessed of a terrible stutter. Lisa Kleypas is my second-favourite romance author, after Julia Quinn, and the Wallflowers series goes a long way to explaining why.Īnnabelle Hunt, Lillian and Daisy Bowman, and Evie Jenner have all spent several seasons on the outskirts of society’s notice, permanent wallflowers - each for a different reason. Title: Secrets of a Summer Night (Wallflowers #1)
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